DESCRIPTION: GHOSTS, GIRLS, & OTHER PHANTASMS is a comprehensive collection of Stephen Goldin's solo short fiction, containing most of the stories from his earlier collection THE LAST GHOST AND OTHER STORIES. (The "Angel in Black" stories have been broken out into their own volume.) It includes some of his best-known stories, such as the Nebula Award finalist story "The Last Ghost" and the oft-anthologized "Sweet Dreams, Melissa." The complete Table of Contents lists:

Sweet Dreams, Melissa

The Girls on USSF 193

Nice Place to Visit

When There's No Man Around

Xenophobe

Grim Fairy Tale

Of Love, Free Will, and Gray Squirrels on a Summer Evening

Stubborn

But As A Soldier, For His Country

The World Where Wishes Worked

Apollyon Ex Machina

Prelude to a Symphony of Unborn Shouts

Portrait of the Artist as a Young God

The Last Ghost

Haunted Houses

The stories in this book run the gamut from humor to pathos, and demonstrate the evolution of a prolific writer in the speculative fiction field. Enjoy!

DESCRIPTION: Starting from the fabled holy city of Ravan, two paths diverge that will take their respective travelers to the farthest reaches of Parsina. The black-hearted thief Hakem Rafi comes into possession of the ultimate power of evil, while the storyteller Jafar al-Sharif and his daughter Selima begin a longer involuntary journey that will test the limits of their ingenuity. But first, they must fool the world's greatest wizard into believing that they, too, are practitioners of the mystic arts. Thus begins the Parsina Saga, a journey through a world of djinni, flying carpets and high adventure in exotic realms -- with the fate of the world at stake.

Starting on his reluctant odyssey with a small party of friends, the storyteller Jafar al-Sharif must cope with treacherous nomads, a desert djinn, a king of an underground realm and an army of animated corpses as he attempts to save the life of his beloved daughter. ==============

Continuing his reluctant odyssey, the storyteller Jafar al-Sharif must cope with fiendish assassins, a city of apes, the King of the Winds, the Isle of Illusions and a mysterious long-vanished underwater city as he attempts to save the life of his beloved daughter.

Prince Ahmad and the storyteller/wizard Jafar al-Sharif are now racing against time to complete their appointed task of gathering the pieces of the Crystal of Oromasd and defeating the evil forces of Rimahn. But the path is perilous as they must visit an island that is not as it appears, learn the secrets of the City of Faces and walk into Mount Denavan, the home of the daevas themselves -- and if this wasn't enough, they must overcome a final betrayal from a member of their own party!

DESCRIPTION: Five supernatural tales from a master storyteller. This book contains the stories:

For Services Rendered

Bride of the Wind

The Chenoo

In the Land of Angra Mainyu

The Masai Witch

Visit the Shop, where the mysterious proprietor will take you on journeys into the second sphere--a land of nightmares, the mystical realm where legendary creatures battle for the souls of humans, and where every victory has its price. But do you dare NOT pay?

DESCRIPTION: For the past five years, Jade Darcy has not seen another human being. A computer-augmented mercenary, she lives on the planet Cablans, a stopover point for traders from hundreds of worlds -- and a good place to meet customers who need the services of a skilled warrior. She turns down what she considers a suicide assignment: traveling to an enslaved world to assassinate one of its military leaders. But then she learns there's another human being on Cablans -- a human being with the potential to expose Jade's mysterious past, with possibly fatal results. All of a sudden, a suicide mission looks positively appetizing.... This is the first published volume in the Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series.

DESCRIPTION: At first, expecting her new job to be easy, Jade Darcy is oblivious to the religious strife wracking the world of Restaapa. Jade and Megan Cafferty, her employer, discover that the Restaapans are in the process of choosing a new heir to the throne. During this process, the candidates hatch plots against anyone they see as a danger to their victory. Each one of them will go to any extreme, even murder, to assure his election as Restaapa's heir. Jade and Megan are pegged as threats that must be eliminated. And Jade has the difficult task of restoring order to Restaapa as well as protecting her own life. This is the second published volume in the Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series.

DESCRIPTION: Alain Cheney is a spy who desperately needs to come in from the cold. Earth is able to maintain what control it can over its former colonies by using telepathic spies. But what even the spies don't know is that, once they reach their late thirties, they begin exhibiting mental instability and must be eliminated to protect the program as a whole. Alain Cheney is one of Earth's best telepaths, but this only makes him more susceptible. He has to battle not only his physical condition, but also his own organization in an attempt to survive. =================